The Nymeyer Connection

Frederick Nymeyer had printed one thousand copies of “The Economics of the Middle-of-the-Road Policy,” which he distributed for free among his fellow Calvinists. The campaign had a resounding echo. A few months later, the Edison Company ordered 3,100 copies, the Norfolk and Western Railway Company ordered 800 copies, and other orders followed.⁷⁰ At least one copy had found its way over the Atlantic and fell on fertile ground. The young English businessman Anthony Fisher asked that forty-eight copies be sent to him as a gift—because of the foreign exchange controls—which he duly received.⁷¹And at least one other copy made it over the Pacific. A Japanese correspondent of Nymeyer's wrote him:

What I find revealing is the fact that such of his pamphlets as I received from you had to be published at all in a country which is supposed to be the only remaining fortress of free enterprise... if the Americans themselves are to be told about the benefits of free enterprise by Austrians of all peoples, it seems to me that the world's malady is pretty far gone.⁷²

In the fall of 1950, spurred by the success of his campaign, Nymeyer set up the publishing company “Consumers-Producers Economic Service” in South Holland, Illinois. This would later become the “Libertarian Press,” which still exists today. Throughout the 1950s, Nymeyer came to New York for two or three days at the beginning of each month and had regular dinner and lunch meetings with Mises. They never became close friends but there were more than mere professional ties between the Jewish agnostic and the Dutch-American Calvinist. Nymeyer eventually convinced himself that Mises was “the greatest living champion of the innermost rampart of Christianity.” In various letters to Howard Pew, Nymeyer summarized many years of reflection on the significance of Mises's work for Christianity:

If there is to be a re-Reformation, it will have to be, in my opinion, on the basis of what the praxeological and the natural sciences have contributed to human knowledge since the days of the reformation. In regard to questions of ethics, I have come to the conclusion that the economics of Dr. von Mises constitutes by far the most satisfactory means to modernize the ethics of the Hebrew-Christian religion. When that kind of a synthesis is made, one turns out to be an extraordinarily conservative adherent of the Christian religion. But also some of the absurdities are removed.⁷³

Nymeyer's publishing venture began as all start-ups do: small scale with big ideas. At first he published copies of Mises's “Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism,” but he already had larger-scale projects in mind; in particular, he planned an American edition of The Theory of Money and Credit and a translation of the final edition of Böhm-Bawerk's three-volume magnum opus.⁷⁴ Mises warned him that the major problem was not to print good books, but to spread the message in a hostile environment:

As conditions are today in this country, such books would be boycotted by the universities, the libraries and the influential newspapers and periodicals. It seems to me that the main problem is to raise the money for counter-acting such a boycott.⁷⁵

Nymeyer knew Mises was right and he knew what to do about it. Many years of networking in American industrial circles had filled his address book, and he was astonishingly capable of bypassing the distribution channels of established publishers to reach the public directly. Mises was impressed. He started giving serious thought to Nymeyer's plan to hire a qualified German-English translator for Böhm-Bawerk's work.

Mises now remembered a young man from Germany who had been attending his NYU seminar for some time. He had come to the United States a year earlier, as one of the first immigrants after the German quota had been opened in the summer of 1949. Hans Sennholz had already studied economics in Marburg and Cologne, and he had received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Cologne in the spring of 1949. In Marburg, a fellow-student had advised him to read the treatise on money by that “sharp Jew” from Vienna, so when Sennholz decided to continue his studies, he recognized Mises's name in the faculty list of New York University. He attended his seminar with great enthusiasm and after some months asked Mises to supervise a Ph.D. dissertation. Sennholz later recalled:

In his twenty-four years at New York University Professor Mises sponsored only four candidates who wrote their dissertations under his tutelage (Sennholz, Spadaro, Kirzner, Reisman). When I first broached my plan to study with him and earn the degree he bluntly rejected me: “Many would like me to sponsor them but only very few are qualified.” I was stunned and hurt but understood his reaction when I learned that the school conferred very few terminal degrees in a year. Professor Mises was not about to sponsor a potential failure. In fact, the four he actually accepted may have been his full share of successful candidates. When I repeated my request six weeks later he reacted quite differently; he readily and courteously accepted me as his candidate and even suggested a number of topics for my dissertation.⁷⁶

During the following years, Sennholz would not only write his doctoral dissertation but also translate Böhm-Bawerk. At Mises's suggestion, Nymeyer also hired native English speaker George D. Huncke as a co-translator.⁷⁷ Many years later, the Nymeyer-Sennholz connection proved to be important in maintaining the mission of Libertarian Press, when Sennholz took over the company.

Nymeyer had another publishing idea that proved to be highly successful. He had given much thought to the question of how Mises's ideas could be presented to the greater public in a more accessible form than a 900-page treatise. He found the answer when, in 1952, his Libertarian Press published a collection of articles that Mises had written during the previous seven years.⁷⁸ The book was titled Planning for Freedom. This was also the title of the first essay, which Mises had written in 1945 in reaction to Hayek's phrase of government planning for competition. The other chapters criticized various aspects of interventionist theory, history, and practice; they also contrasted the interventionist record with the operation of the free market. Each chapter could be read independently of the others, and thus the total made for an excellent “light” introduction to Misesian economics. Sales proved very satisfactory. One order came from the Soviet Union. Mises commented: “I hope that the purchase of Planning for Freedom will complete the Moscow collection of my publications.”⁷⁹